EXECUTIVE BRIEF: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

EXECUTIVE BRIEF: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY; It Takes a Good Host to Run a Spy Agency

By DOUGLAS JEHL,

Published: April 5, 1993

WASHINGTON, April 4—
Given the setting and circumstance, the guests at a recent weekend retreat at which the new Director of Central Intelligence played host might well have wondered if the gathering was intended as some sort of recruitment.

The meeting place was Camp Peary, the legendary C.I.A. compound in Virginia at which American operatives are taught to enlist foreign agents. Inside its classrooms, a dozen members of Congress listened quietly as the Director, R. James Woolsey, offered this pitch: intelligence is a business with a future.

Members of Congress have rarely been welcome at the site; but this was a genial gathering. Along with the military chiefs of the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, Mr. Woolsey had decided it would be wise to get to know better those who hold sway over the vast intelligence budget.

These are unnerving times in the spy business. While President Clinton has apparently decided to spare the agencies from deep immediate cuts, some officials fear that their toughest mission this year may be to dissuade Congress from going further.

In the past, some intelligence chiefs have sought to carry out that task through threat or evasion. Mr. Woolsey, while clearly resistant to quick change, has also elevated solicitousness to strategy.

Already, he has pledged to remain in town (and on call) whenever Congress is in session. He has invited senators to join him on a retreat of their own. On Capitol Hill, he has cultivated aides as earnestly as members.

But it is not clear exactly what collegiality can accomplish. In closed sessions this week, Congressional officials disclosed, the two committees quietly cut $400 million from the estimated $29 billion appropriated for this year's programs. Mr. Woolsey had asked that the cut not be so deep. Early to Bed, Early to Cram

Unlike Mr. Clinton, Mr. Woolsey takes early-to-bed, early-to-rise to an extreme. On the days he sits in Mr. Clinton's 8:30 A.M. intelligence briefing, he has often been awake for four hours, poring over the documents he keeps in a home safe.

By some accounts, that homework is needed. Mr. Woolsey got a headstart on his job last summer, when he studied spy satellites for a commission established by the former Director of Central Intelligence, Robert M. Gates. But in other respects, he still seems to be finding his feet.

"He and I are kind of plowing through these things together," said Representative Dan Glickman, the Kansas Democrat who took over as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee just days before Mr. Woolsey took office. Of the vast system they now both oversee, Mr. Glickman confessed, "It's mind-boggling in its complications."

Asked about his plans for the agency, Mr. Woolsey tends to answer that the matter is under review. But he has quietly begun to push for changes of his own, including a plan to ease restrictions that keep analysts and spies at arms' length.

The barriers between them were imposed in the 1980's, in part to insure that neutral C.I.A. assessments could not be tainted by knowledge of what its agents were doing. But Mr. Woolsey has argued that as the world becomes less predictable, it is important that operators and analysts work together to take measure of events -- and, if necessary, to respond. Of Spy Business And Big Business

At the C.I.A.'s headquarters in Langley, Va., these words are perhaps surest to incite anxiety: economic espionage. The idea of American spies working on behalf of American companies carries little appeal to those wedded to a different notion of national security.

The elevation of the economy as a national priority has nevertheless made the specter difficult for Mr. Woolsey to shake. Ever since he acknowledged before Congress that the idea was the "hottest topic" in the public debate, he has been painted abroad as a gung-ho crusader -- "Indiana Jim and the Temple of Spooks," as The Economist put it.

The intelligence chief has said repeatedly since then that such a mission would be "fraught with legal and foreign policy difficulties." Any fresh American venture is more likely to be aimed at stopping such spying by foreign countries, he has made clear.

But the Clinton Administration's economic fixations even now touch the agency in a very regular way. Until Mr. Clinton took office, only the President, the Vice President, the National Security Adviser and the Secretaries of State and Defense were given a daily C.I.A. briefing.

Mr. Clinton has ordered that the circle be expanded to include Treasury Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen.